On sale: The best bargain you will ever get anywhere

If you are like most people, an “on sale” sign definitely catches your attention. It can be in the real world in a shopping center, on a street shop’s window or in a digital ad when you browse online. The higher the discount, the better. When you see a shining sale sign, you at least do a quick scan of the discounted items, to make sure you don’t miss out on something – a good product for a good price, a good bargain.

That’s alright. It’s how we’re all wired. But let me tell you about the best bargain you will ever get anywhere in your lifetime. There’s only one place on planet Earth where you can get such a once-in-a lifetime bargain. The rate between the price you pay and what you get out of the product is colossal. Incredible.

Did you guess about what kind of a store I’m talking about? A bookstore, of course.

A book is definitely the best bargain you’ll ever get in your life. You pay somewhere between 15$ and 30$ for a thing that can potentially change your life forever – change how you think, how you act and how you see the world. Think about it for a second. Something so inexpensive you can benefit that much from.

It takes an enormous amount of time, intellectual effort and editing to write a good book. The author first needs a creative idea, usually based on years and years of life experience, not to forget a unique angle on the thing the writer is going to write about. Then s/he must develop the main idea, incorporate other important insights and build a structure that makes sense from the beginning to the end.

Usually, it takes months if not years of writing, playing with words, editing, brainstorming and reordering paragraphs until the book is done. Not to mention proofreading, improving the book based on initial feedback and much more. Writing a book is no piece of cake, even less so is writing a really good book.

But what you get on those 200 to 300 pages is incredible – an opportunity to update your mindset, to increase your competence level, to stimulate your imagination, to get an insight into years of someone else’s experience, to improve your vocabulary and to do a general brain workout. You get the opportunity to get in touch with something that can change your life forever. For the price of only 2 to 3 Starbucks coffees. The only thing you have to make sure of when you buy a book is that you read it.

And you get to keep a book you bought forever. You can always revise your knowledge; you can give it forward as a gift or donate it to a library. Whatever happens to the book, when you read it, you get something that stays with you forever. For the price of a good meal.

I would definitely skip a meal to buy a cool book and I would definitely skip a party to read it. Besides, both decisions also have a positive influence on your health.

Well, I think I made my case very clear about why a book is absolutely the best bargain you’ll ever get in life. So every time you get the emotional urge to spend money, go straight for the best possible bargain. Buy yourself a book. If you have no problem buying expensive shoes or a new fancy gadget, if you have no problem spoiling yourself with an expensive dinner, and if you buy thousands of other things that land in drawers, basements and garages more or less forgotten, make sure you also have no problem spending money on books.

You buying a book it’s a sign that you know what a good deal means.

Be happy that the best bargain is really so unbelievably awesome

Make sure you feel super happy when you buy a book, much like you are happy when you buy yourself that thing you wanted for so long. Make sure you respect the effort and intellectual output an author had to make in order to write a product that can give you so much.

And make sure you really read every book you buy, instead of only buying them for giving yourself a fake feeling of lifelong learning and then the only thing the books serve you with is by being dust catchers. Reading a book is the only way a book really becomes a good bargain, otherwise it’s wasted money. Okay, you can stop reading a book if it’s not interesting or doesn’t offer anything new but in such a case, you should already have the next book waiting in line.

There are so many benefits of regular reading, so make sure you read a lot. And make sure you never miss the best possible bargain, either when you’re searching for good deals in a shopping center or at the airport waiting for board or when you’re shopping online or whenever any other opportunity pops up to acquire the most powerful thing in today’s creative society – new knowledge.

About The Author

Blaz Kos writes about data-driven personal development at AgileLeanLife.com. Blaz Kos helps people shape superior life strategies by: (1) employing the best business practices in personal life management, (2) teaching established psychological techniques to better manage mind and emotions, and (3) setting goals based on understanding market paradigms, the quantified self, and following cold hardcore metrics that prevent any fake feeling of progress. He is obsessively passionate about hi-tech, mass media, personal development and making the world a better place.